Re: nettime Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons
Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons Anna Nimus (http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html) A Genealogy of Authors' Property Rights An interesting article, although I don't agree with its (implied) conclusions. The author has not always existed. The image of the author as a wellspring of originality, a genius guided by some secret compulsion to create works of art out of a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, is an 18th century invention. True, but I don't think this is as simple as often claimed. Authors were celebrated during antiquity too, and the idea of plagiarism would not have emerged if there had not been some concept of ownership to an intellectual achievement. Martial who coined the word was plagiarized by the somewhat poorer poet Fidentinus who published Martial's poems as his own. But opposing this was no self-evident attitude at that time. Oral tradition was strong and it was often of highest virtue to tread in someone's footprints, to imitate and even outdo the model. Horace commended Lucilius for his total dependency on the Greek comedy, and Pliny the younger was only flattered to hear that one of his orations was very much alike one of Demosthenes' speeches. Plautus, who was copied by a row of authors from Ariosto and Molière and on to our days, took most of his stuff from Greek authors - but gave them a Roman touch. This should have been to Horace's liking but he blamed Plautus for not being sufficiently faithful to the originals! And Cicero even claimed that the ancestors' works constituted a common pool for everybody to share, although he himself undoubtedly contributed and increased this pool with certain findings of his own Originality was nevertheless desirable. Seneca writes in his letters that whatever we have incorporated, it may still not remain unaltered, then it will not become a part of ourselves. In the mid 1750s, Edward Young and Samuel Richardson were the first to argue that the work of an author, since it was a product of his unique personality, was more truly an author's property than the material objects produced by a worker. Well, I believe this notion was well on its way already in Milton, Sidney, Pope, and Defoe. Even ancient Greece had it in a strange way, since many Greeks saw writing as something so incredibly personal that they regarded a reader as being raped by the writer. One way of escaping this fate was to have slaves (rhapsodes) reading out loud. (Another extreme - and modern - version of this view was Ayn Rand's; she held intellectual property as so immensely personal that it could not be inherited.) If property is theft, as Proudhon famously argued, then intellectual property is fraud. Property is theft because the owner of property has no legitimate claim to the product of labour. Note that even Proudhon changed his mind about intellectual property. In Théorie de la Propriété from 1863 he says it was really the common man's protection against the state: La propriété est la seule capable de s'opposer à l'Etat. But if physical property can be stolen, can intelligence or ideas be stolen? In ancient and medieval times the intellectual and physical property was not yet separated. Especially when a book could cost a person twenty or thirty sheep, the owner would not always let just anybody copy it, but held on to it, despite the fact that information can be shared without (material) loss - in Jefferson's words, as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Earlier one believed that the owner of the physical item, the book, also got the ownership of copies done on the basis of this book, as a farmer who owns a cow also owns the cow's offspring. When the bearer (medium) of information was separated from the information itself this was a big step forward, that made issuing to the public possible. The most famous rant against piracy was Samuel Richardson's 1753 pamphlets denouncing unauthorized Irish reprints of his novel Sir Charles Grandison. Defoe is not bad either: This is really a most injurious piece of Violence, and a Grievance to all Mankind; for it not only robs their Neighbour of their just: Right, but it robs Men of the due Reward of Industry, the Prize of Learning, and the Benefit of their Studies; in the next Place, it robs the Reader, by printing Copies of other Men uncorrect and imperfect, making surreptitious and spurious Collections, and innumerable Errors, by which the Design of the Author is often inverted, conceal'd, or destroy'd, and the Information the World would reap by a curious and well studied Discourse, is dwindled into Confusion and Nonsense. [...] I think in Justice, no Man has a Right to make any Abridgment of a Book, but the Proprietor of the Book; and I am sure no Man can be so well qualified for the doing it, as the Author, if alive, because no Man can be capable of knowing the true Sense of the Design, or of giving it a due Turn like him
Re: Re: nettime Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons
Apropos of Anna Nimus's text, Felix Stalder wrote: Which seems to leave as the conclusion that within capitalism the structure of copyright, or IP more generally, doesn't really matter, because it either supports directly fundamentally-flawed notions of property (à la CC), or it does not prevent the common resource to be used in support of capitalist ends (à la GPL). In this view, copyfights appear to articulate a secondary contradiction within capitalism, which cannot solved as long as the main contradition, that between labor and capital, is not redressed. Is that it? It is indeed interesting to see how the meaning of a text is reproduced -differently - within the heads of different people. I read the text, but didn't trace any contradictions in the syllogisms put forth: in fact, I'd say they resonated with my own feelings about Creative Commons: their inability to influence policy making, let alone ignite a society-wide discussion about the property form itself. In my opinion, even on a purely technical level, the entire spectrum of licenses (perhaps with the sole exception of the attribution sharealike?) offered by CC only facilitate that anything posted on the Web, any word posted on a weblog, is easier to enclose within the bounds of copyright law in accord with the mandates of an irrational...or rather, in accord with irrational mandates. Put bluntly: Creative Commons is a commercial in which the figure of the revolution and the theme of the freedom of information entwine with the Creative Author to commodify more things. Of course, this is not the case with the GPL: while it allows commercial (re)use, it does not permit private appropriation - and this is important, but I will not make this digression even longer than it necessarily has to be, and besides I don't think that a long analysis of the licenses discussed in the essay is capturing the essence of the discussion: intellectual property is property. Unless we are willing to err on metaphysics, which I find unlikely, we must admit that the distinctions and the categories forced upon the discussion by Lessig et al. (that is, that intellectual property is fundamentally different from material property because it can be reproduced at negligible or no cost, and whatever follows) are nonsensical to say the least, and reactionary at worst. That said, neither the GPL, even when applied to the totality of material production, begets a world freed from private property. The relation of private property remains the relationship of the community to the world of things...the community as universal capitalist. What is however equally important is that ultimately this movement to oppose universal private property to private property is expressed in bestial form. Which makes things infinitely more interesting than a contradictory regime predicated on what is fair to use, and what is not on the basis not of your needs, but on the inherent properties of the product. Whereas, in antithesis to this predicate, a GPL'ed regime recognises my need and the instrinsic qualities of the product (of the object of my need) as the same, thus avoiding the antinomy to which CC myopically subscribes. g. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
RE: nettime Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons
Hi, I guess the point is that if you are an author, who is willing to accept money for a work that is offered by someone, who is willing to pay for the work is counter-revolutionary. :)) If that was not true, then the author wouldn't have had any problem with markets for cultural goods (aka commercial appropriation). But if there are markets there will always be disputes on how the revenues from a market are divided between different contributors who participated in the process of production, from the paper maker, via the writer, illustrator, type-setter, printer, book-binder, publisher, distributor to the retailer. I see copyright and copyleft as different solutions to the problem of revenue sharing. Different in term of how the solution is reached: through lobby-power in legislation or through grassroots organization. In this respect the whole 'Death of the Author' discourse is totally indifferent. It is not the author's ontological status that defines how we think about property rights in intellectual creations but raw power. The way to change the hated copyright system is not by denying it but to gain control over it. User (reader) rights, non-monetary ideals are underrepresented in current copyright legislations because there was no institution that could aggregate the interests of the disperse, atomized individual readers. File-sharing networks just do that. File sharers are a match to RIAA and other interest groups. though the first experiments with gaining political momentum have failed, i hope there is a next time, and/or there is no need for a political arm for file-sharing. b.- - Balazs Bodo http://www.warsystems.hu/ Fulbright Visiting Researcher and Fellow Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/ Budapest University of Technology, Department of Sociology and Communications Center for Media Research and Education http://mokk.bme.hu/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons
Felix Stalder wrote: In this view, copyfights appear to articulate a secondary contradiction within capitalism, which cannot solved as long as the main contradition, that between labor and capital, is not redressed. Is that it? Hello Felix, that is more or less it, yes, free culture is bankrupt in the absence of free production. So long as capitalism is the dominant mode of production, the majority of the marginal contribution to production of free culture will be captured by way of economic rents and accumulated by capital owners. Regards, Dmytri Kleiner http://www.telekommunisten.net Robotnik # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons
I'm not sure I understand the main thrust of the argument. On the one hand, GPL-type copyleft is criticized for not preventing the appropriation (or, more precisely, use) of code by commercial, capitalist interests. These still manage to move profits from labor (employees / contractors who are paid less than the value their labor produces) into the hands of the capital (shareholders, I guess). On the other hand, Creative Commons, which precisely enables the author to prevent this through the non-commercial clause is criticized for perpetuating the proprietary logic embodied in the author function controlling the use of the work. Which seems to leave as the conclusion that within capitalism the structure of copyright, or IP more generally, doesn't really matter, because it either supports directly fundamentally-flawed notions of property (à la CC), or it does not prevent the common resource to be used in support of capitalist ends (à la GPL). In this view, copyfights appear to articulate a secondary contradiction within capitalism, which cannot solved as long as the main contradition, that between labor and capital, is not redressed. Is that it? # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
